Colours into Tones Part 1

This exercise requires me to capture an image which contained two strong colours:-

blue and green or

yellow and blue or

green and red

I then had to make a black and white copy and once copied make adjustments on each of the strong colours to see what effect this had on not only the selected colours but the other colours in the image and the image itself. What difference will there changes make?

I remembered an image I took of a piece of farm equipment in a green field, with a clear blue sky above. This image on its own had three strong colours. As you can see there are strong reds on the machine, green in the field and blue in the sky with a section of darker blue on the machine. There is also a small section of detail in shadow, how will this be effected?

Image 1

Original Image

Here is a straight conversion to black and white.

Image 2

Black and white

It is a nice clear image, the red still stands out from the blue, not so well against the green.

Here are the black and white versions , first we have the image with the red tone reduced and the green set to maximum.

Image 3

Red minus - green positive

We can see that the reds are nearly black, the black in the centre of the wheels now stands out more. The greens are slightly lighter.

And the opposite image

Image 4

Red positive - green negative

You can clearly see that there is a huge difference between the above two images. Look at the body of the piece of equipment, the dirt/rust marks really stand out. The blue sky is nearly white, although there is less of a change in the darker blue mid section.

I would go as far as saying that it looks like 4 different pieces of equipment.

What do they look like next to each other?

Image 5

After looking at each of the images I do like the look of image three (with the red box around it above), if you had not seen the original picture would you ever know that the piece of equipment was originally red? Of course the sky would have to be looked at as it is too bright.

The grass in the shaded area seems to stand out better in the straight black and white conversion.